National Home Visiting Programs' Shared Vision Statement
The senior programming, advocacy and executive leadership of five of the leading national home visitation programs (Healthy Families America, HIPPY, Nurse-Family Partnership, Parents as Teachers and The Parent-Child Home Program) have developed a shared vision to nurture the healthy, secure development of our nation’s children and families. These organizations are committed to maintaining an on-going, direct and honest dialogue and improved communication among our programs. Each organization shares a passion for and a commitment to improving the well-being of our nation’s children and families and focusing national attention on home visiting as a critical service delivery strategy for strengthening America’s children and families. While each program is uniquely designed, they all have a valuable role to play in meeting the complex needs of families and communities across the country. The organizations have determined that they have a great deal in common and endorse this, as their common vision:
Communities are Best Served by a Range of Quality Home Visitation Program Options
• Prevention services in general are underfunded and a low priority on our nation’s domestic policy agenda. The complexity and volume of need among families and young children in this nation far exceeds the capacity of any one of our programs. Therefore, we will work together to advocate for a greater investment in effective prevention programs for children and families. • Home visitation is a service delivery strategy that is essential to better support our country’s youngest children. We are unified in our view that building relationships with parents and children in their home environments is a uniquely valuable approach to nurturing parental competence and successful early childhood development. Together, we intend to make this type of service delivery practice more broadly accepted and a welcome and trusted approach in family development. • Communities require a strong continuum of effective programs for children and families in need of support throughout their life spans. There are many communities that are successfully implementing multiple home visiting programs in an integrated approach to building that continuum of care. We applaud those communities for successfully collaborating to meet the varied needs of families.
Families Nationwide Need Access to Early Childhood Home Visitation Services
• Different programs may be eligible for different sources of funding and those differences can be helpful in reducing competition and improving collaboration. We each will work to expand existing and build new funding streams for home visiting services from all possible sources and support funding streams that allow states and communities to choose among quality programmatic options.
Continuous Quality Improvement is Essential
• We are all committed to ensuring each of the local implementations of our respective national models is strong and effective. We are all working to provide guidance and support that will enable local agencies to adhere to the quality standards set by each model. • All of our programs commit to maintain and enhance our capacity to use solid and rigorous research and evaluation to implement our programs effectively and to assess and strengthen outcomes for children and families. We recognize that each program contributes its own experiences and perspectives to the discussion on program efficacy. We will continue to support one another’s commitment to continuous quality improvement and ongoing program evaluation to better meet the needs of the families we serve.